She’s not my type

A psychedelic fascist is a person who is overly bossy in minor aesthetic matters.

This useful term comes from an shameful episode wherein the present author rebuked a colleague for his font choice, forcefully insisting that this friendly coworker (for whom English was a foreign language!) never ever use comic sans. Upon reflection, this behavior must’ve seemed not only ludicrously strident, but ludicrously strident about trivial/weird details. I felt that I had acted not just as a fascist, but a psychedelic fascist.

(I mean, the actual difference between comic sans and more ‘professional’ fonts is… and to a person learning English, whose principal concern about a script is legibility…)

Anyhow! This term has been in doomspirals circulation a couple of years and so I was heartened to make a recent discovery: I believe to have discovered the Patron Saint of Psychedelic Fascism. Ye olde Richard Bentley (1662–1742). Bentley was a professor at Cambridge, a deacon in the Anglican Church, and one of the most gifted & ambitious literary critics & classicists of his era. He produced important works on Horace, Homer, and others, but his edition of Astronomica, the 1st century AD Latin astronomical poem by Manilius, is considered his masterpiece. But! Bentley delayed publication of his masterpiece for forty years because homeboy egghead was a sincere psychedelic fascist…

G.W. Bowersock writes that Bentley, “had, by his own admission, aborted the publication of his Manilius in the late 1680s because he had disapproved of the typography of his publisher at that time.” Dang! Baby no like the fonts! Bowersock [stupid name] speculates that, after several decades of delay, Bentley finally published his masterpiece in the late 1730s “once he had found in Henry Woodfall a publisher who would produce a beautiful volume and typeface.” LoL, I labored over the translation of an obscure, millennia-old five-part Latin poem concerning the nature of the heavenly spheres & the pattern’d motion of the stars… but was compell’d to stash it on the shelf for two score years because I was not feeling yr Sussex PorridgeShire Helvetica…

One Response to “She’s not my type”

Not to be confused with a person fastidious in their private affairs—each is entitled to be exacting re: the hue of his boudoir, the cut of his pantaloon. A psychedelic fascist is someone risibly picky in public; someone who pushes their particular persnickety persuasion on others, usually in the context of artistic collaboration.

To be stridently insistent on the type of card stock used for an invitation (for example) is to be, in view of a Normal Person, not only an interpersonal butthead (“fascist”), but pushy on a subject that is seemingly trivial and weird/trippy (“psychedelic”). To trod on social graces to go to bat for 100lb taupe card stock, in the view of a Normal Person, is the behavior of a psychedelic fascist.

[Obviously, the doomspirals editorial board is frequently guilty of this ludicrous behavior!]